HCI, CMC, and CSCW Design at Cornell University

Cornell has a strong and growing group of researchers interested in understanding and supporting interactions between people, computers, and society. We span a variety of disciplines, including communication, computer science, information science, psychology, science and technology studies, and sociology. We use a number of methodologies, including system-building, field studies, lab experiments, modeling,, and critical theory. And finally, we study these interactions in the context of real, important problems.

The two most common majors (for undergrads) or fields (for graduate students) for HCI students are communication and information science. Students interested in HCI should definitely contact the departments, as well as the individual professors listed below whose interests most closely align with theirs, to talk about how to match their goals with what Cornell offers. In addition, below is a list of courses that are offered in either (or both) departments, along with courses from other departments that HCI students commonly take.

People

Natalie Bazarova
My research focuses on how technology affects the way we see and relate to one another, and how perceptions affect our adaptation to technology, performance, and relationships in interpersonal, organizational, and cross-cultural interactions. For more information about my research, visit my website.

Jeremy Birnholtz
My research aims to improve the usefullness and usability of communication and collaboration tools, with a particular focus on understanding and exploiting mechanisms of human attention.

Dan Cosley
My main interest for a long time has been helping people make sense of and manage information, both individually and as groups. More recently this has grown to include leveraging people's current behaviors online, along with social science theory, to produce individual and social goods that otherwise would not have been created.

Laura Forlano
I'm interesting in exploring the intersection between organizations, technology (in particular, mobile and wireless technology) and the role of place in communication, collaboration and innovation.

Susan Fussell
My research focuses on interpersonal communication in face-to-face and computer-mediated contexts. My goals are to enhance our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms involved in conversational discourse and to apply this theory to the design and evaluation of new communications technologies.

Geri Gay
Her research focuses on social and technical issues in the design of interactive communication technologies. Specifically, she is interested in social navigation, affective computing, social networking, mobile computing, and design theory.

Francois Guimbretiere
The overarching goal of my research is to bring the ease of use of pen and paper interactions to computer interfaces.

Jeff Hancock
Jeff is interested in social media, with an emphasis on how people produce and understand language and the self. His research has focused on two types of language, verbal irony and deception, and on a number of cognitive and social psychological factors affected by social media, including self-presentation, identity, persuasion and social influence, attributions and the intensification of social dynamics online.

Gilly Leshed
I am currently working on a new project that looks into the culture of overwork and the role of technology in mitigating and/or encouraging practices of overwork.

Phoebe Sengers
My research integrates systems design with critical, cultural analysis of interaction, of technology, and of HCI practice itself. I am interested in identifying and designing for values commonly left out of technical practice, focusing on issues around consumer culture, sustainability, and modernism. My current major project is a design-ethnographic study of modernization in the small fishing community of Change Islands, Newfoundland.